ABSTRACT
When teachers ask searching questions about educational practice that arise from their context and experiences, they exemplify a flexible and active approach to professional learning by seeking out new strategies and ideas, trying new ways of working and evaluating and reflecting on the outcomes to improve their own practice. This chapter presents a range of active engagement techniques, which research has shown underpins effective teaching to promote pupil learning. These include an analysis of the purpose and potential uses of modelling, questioning, explaining and small group work. As teachers assimilate new strategies and ideas within their own practice and actively questioning what they claim to know, they appropriate new knowledge and the insights gained are expressed in terms of new possibilities for teaching since the personal assumptions, beliefs and theories about their own practice are reframed.
